Isn't Everything Absurd, or Life Is Not a Laughing Matter
— or Is It?

By John Llewellyn

Being an attempt to express in words a foolhardy desire to define
the indefinable

Any one of you who has once felt the touch of the god within never
is the same again. Never can be the same again. Your life is changed;
and you can have this awakening at any moment, any moment that
you will take it. — G. de Purucker

This morning as I walked to work rather leisurely, because it
was such a beautiful day, I was suddenly struck by the overwhelming
absurdity of everything. I don't want you to think that I am adopting
a superior attitude in saying this because, as the feeling swept
over me, I laughed out loud; not so loud that others might have
been discomfited, but loud enough for one or two to turn in my
direction and smile with curiosity. The thought was a momentary
one, but lasted long enough for me to recognize that this change
of attitude allowed me to participate, temporarily at least, in
the ambience of a moment's reality, more beautiful, and with a
certitude more authentic, than the combined hours of months.

Such moments are notoriously difficult to describe. They have
a tenuous quality, rather like a dream in which one floats rather
than walks. This imperceptible shift from one state to another
is too convincing to be shrugged off as a mere aberration of the
mind, because the overwhelming effect is such that, during that
moment, one is transformed in the twinkling of an eye from a heavy-footed
person with unbearable intimations of mortality of cruciform proportions
to a being bathed in light and wholly exempt from the so-called
blunders of human existence, so well known that they need no description.

My laughter was, I suppose, a reflex action, and yet, as one who
seldom laughs, I recognized that its spontaneity owed its existence
to the sudden realization of my human predicament. It was then
that I understood the absurdity of my situation and by implication
the absurdity of everything including myself. It is no exaggeration
to say that much that I have hitherto regarded as serious and
important is now seen as inconsequential trifles. Returning to
my normal frame of reference was rather like penetrating a gigantic,
sticky membrane, weblike, in which I was engulfed and hopelessly
entangled, and which embraced the whole of history's crimes.

The impression of that fleeting moment lingers in my mind like
the taste of buttermilk. Childlike I had participated in the cosmic
dance of which I had been ignorant. During that felicitous moment
my identity was not destroyed, but redefined in a manner which
swept aside all the usual and false assumptions of happiness.
The horror of a dualistic universe which haunts the world ceased
with the finality of a grin on a decomposing corpse. It was a
moment of plenitude in which neither sin nor forgiveness entered,
and conceptions of perfection were superfluous. The myth of "becoming"
was shattered by the authenticity of "being." Old age
is upon me, but the cataracts in my eyes now seem irrelevant.

The motorway conveyor belt of cars is destined for the scrap heap,
and now as I watch them from my window, I laugh again at the absurdity
of everything, but brace myself for the sadness which will sweep
over me when the amnesia of habit renders me blind again.

I wonder, what it was that produced that laugh which allowed me
to grasp the absurdity of everything. That phrase, "the absurdity
of everything," is not at all inappropriate, although it
has a harsh and superficial sound; but the laugh which accompanied
it had no malice behind it. It was as though the unbelievable
had become true, and it was absurd to imagine otherwise. It was
like a child in a friendly game, feigning death, and his father
is alarmed until the child leaps into life and cries out, "I
am not dead after all."

Later in the day I searched the terrain for clues. Retracing my
steps, I faithfully repeated my long journey from the absurd to
the absurd. The speckled shadows of the trees had gone, so too
had the blackbird who had watched me with cautious concern. I
shall try again tomorrow, before the air is stale, but I have
the feeling that it is a form of sacrilege to try. I do not require
the strength of Hercules or the patience of Job. Neither is it
a question of cunning or skill. Perhaps it has something to do
with tension. Who knows? Was it the tension of the archer's bow
as the arrow flew? Too often we miss the target; but occasionally
it flies true and, marvel of marvels, pierces the invisible bull's
eye in another dimension.

This is the time of the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, rigid, difficult
and materialistic, when development can be accelerated, when truth
can be born from sufferings. So be it. Tonight I shall watch the
news on TV as usual. The strident music of its introduction swiftly
puts me into my customary state of alarm and apprehension at the
world's goings on. There is nothing like a procession of politicians
with their lugubrious expressions of imminent doom to support
one's conviction that this place is a cosmic lunatic asylum; and
yet it will not be quite the same again. The colored shapes on
the screen look real enough, and the harvest of man's inhumanity
is not diminished; but I wonder now if it is but a question of
perception. Once I perceived the "real" — not the real
world of politics and commerce, that wretched conspiracy of greed
and power which has corrupted the "real" since Cain.

With that perception, it occurred to me that the certitude which
entered me, brief though it was, reminded me of distant childhood
in which innocence and wisdom are miraculously married to the
beauty and perfection of the present moment, the "now"
of the ineffable, in which the redemption of all things is made
plain. It was a transitory moment when I forgot to gaze into my
personal world-distorting mirror; when the usual caricature of
life I thought I knew so well, ceased to torment me. I suppose
that is why I laughed; the very idea of what passes for reality,
virtual or otherwise, was too absurd for words. This burst of
sudden laughter was the laughter of the gods perhaps, that man
should doubt his true origins, even though he be bathed in light.